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Character Education and Workplace Success
David Smith, President, Council for Ethics in Economics
Panel:
LeJoyce Naylor, Manager of Corporate Ethics and Diversity for the Lubrizol Corporation
Evelyn Walker, Special Accounts Manager for Discover Financial Services
Glenn Soden, Assistant Secretary of Nationwide
Penny Purviance, Administrator for the Ohio Department of Administrative Services
David Smith: The Council for Ethics in Economics (CEE) is the statewide partner with the Department Education in the Ohio Partners in Education (OPCE). CEE is a membership organization of companies, colleges and universities, professional practices in law and accounting, and colleges and universities concerned with strengthening ethics in business and economic life. We regard good character as part of ethical competence, along with skills in decision-making and good judgment, and the Council’s interest in supporting character education in Ohio has truly been driven by the concerns of our member companies. As early as 1992, the Council sponsored a major program here in Central Ohio on fostering honesty in the workplace. The issues come up again and again, the connection between character and employment success. Mary Aranha mentioned some of those this morning: the need for reliability, punctuality and teamwork, and of course Governor Taft mentioned the work of our Management Advisory Group in Construction.
As we thought about what we could contribute to this project, we decided it would be the insight of experienced managers about issues of character in the workplace. This prompted CEE to organize eleven Management Advisory Groups in different sectors, public employment, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, call centers and several others. Nearly a hundred business people and public administrators and officials participated in that project. The reports of these groups are available on the OPCE web site or on CEE’s web site. You can get those reports and read them in Adobe or download them. I think they’re rich in practical insight, but above all, these reports led, in many cases, to fruitful dialogue between business people and educators, and mutual learning. For educators, it seems to me, the discussions with business people and employers opened an important sector of community support.
So, it’s my pleasure to chair this panel. The members of our panel are conveners or members of the advisory groups that study these issues in detail. Each of the panelists will speak for six or seven minutes, leaving us time for questions. I will invite the panelists to speak in the order that they are listed in the program, and I will simply introduce all four of them now. LeJoyce Naylor is Manager of Corporate Ethics and Diversity for the Lubrizol Corporation, one of the conference sponsors. Just outside the door, there are displays by sponsors Lubrizol and Honda of America Mfg. Lubrizol has put its ethics manual there, and I urge you to pick that up and take a look at it. I think you’ll find it extraordinary to see how what we talk about as character is reflected in very high expectations and demands and needs of a major employer. Evelyn Walker, Special Accounts Manager for Discover Financial Services was chair of our management advisory group on call centers. Glenn Soden, Assistant Secretary of Nationwide, chaired the group on character issues in financial services, insurance, banking and brokerage. Penny Purviance is Administrator for the Ohio Department of Administrative Services and was a member of the management advisory group on character issues in public employment.
LeJoyce Naylor: Thank you very much. I am Manager of Corporate Ethics for the Lubrizol Corporation, which is a manufacturing company in Wickliffe, Ohio. For those of you who may not be familiar with us, Lubrizol is a 1.7 billion dollar fluid technology company, concentrating on high performance chemicals, systems and services for transportation and industry. To structure our discussion this afternoon, I will talk about leadership, because our students of today are leaders of tomorrow, then discuss the character traits that our young people need to be successful in the workplace. Having effective leaders and employees of good character at all levels of an organization helps to create a culture for success. In the face of competitive pressures to improve quality and service, reduce cost, and increase shareholder value, the issues of ethics, leadership and character are inseparable. They are critical for sustaining a company’s long-term growth. Our CEO, Bill Bares, has stated that in conducting our daily activities we must be concerned not only with the result, but also how we achieve those results. We insist on honesty and integrity in dealing with our customers, suppliers, and most importantly, one another.
So what does effective leadership look like at Lubrizol? Well, it consists of, first of all, personal trustworthiness. That means acting with integrity, being honest and truthful, accepting responsibility, and encouraging others to do the right thing. It means keeping commitment, being functional and proficient and using sound judgment.
Next we have interpersonal trust. That’s being a team player, encouraging participation from others, treating co-workers with a sense of fairness and a sense of respect, valuing differences, being tolerant and compassionate, listening and responding with empathy.
Third, managing through empowerment, and that’s providing support, training and authority to enable individuals to make the right decisions about the best way to perform work. It requires team members who are honest, responsible and dependable. Finally, we have organizational alignment, and that’s operating from a strategic perspective and establishing a shared vision for the company. It means balancing the big picture, leading courageously, stepping forward to address very difficult issues and concerns.
So if leadership is defined as getting the right results through the right behaviors, and these character qualities of success are the foundation of our leadership, then what are we looking for in employees who will one day step into these leadership roles? We’re looking for honesty, trustworthiness, reliability, punctuality, getting along well with people, and cooperation with supervisors. When you think about students, this translates to one who can cooperate with teachers, one who accepts and handles responsibility, and someone who is willing to undergo further job training. It also means having moral courage, and that’s doing the right thing, even sometimes when others are recommending that you not do the right thing. Also, flexibility and willingness to serve are important.
As I previously mentioned, effective leadership is getting the right results through the right behaviors. Our current and future leaders must have several qualities of character in order to be successful in the workplace. An employee is successful when they routinely demonstrate that they can operate with high ethical standards and have strong character. A company is successful when they have strong leadership, employees with solid character and a culture that operates in an ethical manner. Thank you very much.
Evelyn Walker: Thank you. I work for Discover Financial Services, which is a division of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. We have over 40 million card members nationwide and billions of dollars in assets under our care, so it is an issue of trust right from the beginning. I’ve been with Discover Card now for about fourteen years. I’ve served on the Merchant Services side of the business, card member collections, training and human resources and I chaired the Call Center Management Advisory Group for the OPCE. I’m not sure everyone understands what a call center is; it might help to explain that our Management Advisory Group also had representatives from American Electric Power, so if you are calling the electric company to say, “My power is out,” then you need someone there on the phone to answer your call.
Call centers represent one of the fastest growing employment sectors in the economy today. They provide a variety of challenging careers in customer service, in telemarketing, and in collecting. The managers in our discussions agreed that character traits are extremely important for success in our business. A career in a call center requires a very demanding skill set. Our employees need computer and keyboarding proficiency, but also the ability to work in a very demanding position mentally. Customer service representatives typically can handle 4,000 calls a month. That’s not unusual. They are in constant contact with customers, creating and maintaining the public’s perception of your company. As you probably know, if you’re happy with your company, you’ll tell one or two people if the subject happens to come up. But what happens if you’re upset with a company? You’ll tell anyone who listens, right? So, they’re very, very important to our business. Telemarketing and collections positions sometimes require a great deal of patience and perseverance to make that needed contact, but once contact is made, it’s all the more important that that communication is effective.
So the most successful call center employees have excellent communication skills, they’re passionate about helping customers, and this holds true for collectors as well as customer service representatives. At Discover Card we call that area of our company Card Member Assistance, because their job is to educate and assist card members. They’re masters of conflict resolution, negotiation, they can be assertive when needed and are self-confident enough to recover from a negative call. We don’t ask a lot, do we? Articulate, mature, professional, empathetic, strong, and assertive when needed, and by the way, let me put in a plug, at Discover Card we love to hire teachers for part-time or summer work. You’re terrific! You have a great track record. The call center managers agreed we can’t stress enough the importance of character traits in our business. You know computers are important in a call center, you walk in and there are just masses of workstations with computers and telephone lines and so forth. But if a computer breaks down you normally can replace a board, fix some software and you are back and running. It’s the employees that make a company great and sustain profits over the long term. It’s that corporate culture that you create that makes a company strong over the long term.
So I’d like to highlight just two of the seven character traits that the call center managers identified as critical, and I think accountability is one of the traits that best illustrates how character impacts the bottom line and puts some dollars and cents with some of the things we’re talking about in the concepts. The average daily student absenteeism for a local school was estimated to be 20-25%. This is unacceptable in a business environment. As Mary said this morning, the first step to success is showing up. A 20% staffing buffer to cover absenteeism is cost prohibitive. All of the call centers reported reliability as expected to be at 95% or better. Excessive absenteeism or tardiness will result in disciplinary measures up to and including termination of employment. And we have some employees that just can’t fathom the fact that they can be terminated because they were tardy. And sometimes it takes a great deal of coaching to help people understand this.
Another example comes from the current dropout level of a local school. It was reported at 50-60%. Job abandonment is becoming an increasingly serious problem for all areas of business, including call centers. From a call center perspective we invest from two weeks to six months to train newly hired employees. New hires need to master technical and customer service skills, and then achieve the productivity expectations that we have set for them. This is a huge investment to then have someone just stop coming to work without any explanation. The average cost of frontline turnover has recently been estimated at over $3,000 per person. So if you take even a small call center environment, say 400 people, at a 10% turnover rate, which is extremely good, we’re looking at $120,000. So when you put it in dollars and cents from a business perspective, this is a very, very important issue.
Another character trait that call center managers identified as critical for a business is a servant attitude, and I think this is unique for a call center. It goes beyond a basic respect. I think we, as most companies today, have a zero tolerance for any type of harassment, violence, or even a threat of violence. We demand tolerance and teamwork and fair play. But in a call center we are looking for even more: for compassion, caring, empathy, and kindness. One of our managers talked about how they structure their entire interviewing process to hire the heart. Your customer service center can easily make or break your company.
Every call center manager spoke of the extensive in-house training programs to help employees improve customer service. The American Banking Association developed a calculation to demonstrate the value of customer satisfaction. It suggests a scenario where the number of customers lost due to service was multiplied by the average profit per customer, and that’s added to the cost of replacing those customers in terms of marketing and those other expenses, and it can mean millions of dollars to the bottom line. So corporations have an extremely high stake in the quality of society. Not just in terms of the available work force, but in realizing that a volatile economy, or a large base of low wage, unhealthy or uneducated consumers is not conducive to profitability.
And that’s why all of the call center managers also reported community involvement as a needed character trait and why business is anxious to help educators where we can. It’s why we’re a corporate sponsor (of the Governor’s Summit on Character Education) today. It’s in everyone’s best interest. We included a number of our company’s policies, including codes of conduct and AEP supplied their employee training on how to make ethical choices. That’s in our Management Advisory Group’s report. We also listed resources that many of the call centers are using to help parents in balancing their busy lives, raising families and teaching character. We are committed to assist educators to find ways to support each other in reinforcing these concepts, and if you haven’t stopped by Discover Card’s table out there, please pick up my business card. Feel free to call me any time, and, if we could work with you, we would love to.
Glen Soden: Good afternoon. I’m here representing the group that worked on the Financial Services Management Advisory Group. We had a fairly diverse group when we first started our discussions back in March of 1999. We had a group of insurance companies, financial services companies, banks and mortgage companies and brokerages all together in a common dialogue. It was interesting in that this was before financial reform hit Congress, and we had the groups of us exploring together to address the workplace issues and how do we bring the workplace together for our clients.
We started our introduction with a true story. We talked about a young girl from South Carolina who was named Rosalie Elliott. And she was asked at a spelling bee to spell the word ‘avowal’, a-v-o-w-a-l. Well, her soft southern accent, the judges just weren’t sure whether she said an ‘a’ or an ‘e’ at the end, of course, an ‘e’ would make the word incorrect. And so they viewed videotapes and looked at that to see what they could do. Finally they just couldn’t make the determination whether she was right or wrong, so they asked her, “Was that an ‘a’ or was that an ‘e’?” And to her credit, she admitted, and by that time she had heard the other kids and she knew that it was an ‘a’, but she said, “No, I was wrong. I said ‘e’.” And we used that as just a look at what the youth of today are about. There’s a lot of integrity there and how do we continue to develop that for our workplace to make our workplace successful?
We looked fairly quickly at some of the responsibilities in the workplace and how to build those from a character education standpoint. We agreed very quickly on seven: honesty, personal responsibility, respect for authority and others, selflessness, civility and tolerance and ethical competencies, or knowing what is wrong. We started to look at how we can develop some tools, how can we suggest from an employment standpoint some of those issues that may help in character building, not only at the high school level, but how do we capture and work with character building and education at an earlier level, at the elementary level? And build that throughout life so that we can then offer jobs and opportunities to the youth of today and the adults of tomorrow. We looked at some fairly simple examples that we might share, one of which became kind of a case study for the financial services industry. Someone goes to a bank machine or to a teller and they ask for $120, and they get $140, you know, two twenties are stuck together. What does that person then do? Do they understand the ramifications of their actions? And we began to look at how do you build that into an education scenario so that students can understand? And so many times the reaction is, “Oh, lucky me. I’ve got an extra twenty dollars.” But do they really understand the ramifications to the teller. What if the teller’s made an error before and they’re on their last opportunity. The teller’s husband or spouse has just lost his/her job and they’re dependant for the family’s income on this individual to support and sponsor the family. What are the ramifications for those types of actions? What does it mean? And how do people react in society and how do we bring that together through hard work?
We have an employee handbook that we give to employees, but the sad thing is that often the employee handbook is too late for a lot of new employees. It has things in it that can affect them; maybe they haven’t developed the character and qualities that they need to really sustain them in a work-life environment. For example, in the financial services industry, a lot of our employees have to be bonded. Did you know, if someone has a prior indiscretion in high school or in college, it may make him or her unbondable if we discover that at some point, either during the employment process or later? The person may become unemployed because of that incident. It becomes something that–even for a minor indiscretion of taking something that doesn’t belong to them–something that reaches a certain level can actually create an employment liability for them in the financial services sector. So it becomes very important that students learn at a very early age that their actions and their reactions have consequences in terms of their long term livelihood and what that means. I had an interesting example just the other day in how it’s almost become accepted sometimes that it’s okay to do things. I was at a cash register and paid the woman with some change. The quarter fell into her pocket, and I said, “Wow, that’s a lucky catch,” and she said, “Well, it depends who’s watching me.” To make light of it in that vein, that she would think that it was okay to say that to somebody she doesn’t even know in a checkout line, shows there may be some things that we need to address with character education.
These are the things we tried to address as a group. We had some interesting discussions and dialogues in the sessions. Our hope was not to dictate to curriculum, but to offer some scenarios from our own experience. From a financial services or insurance perspective, what are the kinds of scenarios that can affect people? What about people justifying? They’ve paid high premiums over time and they’ll just have that extra ding that’s in the car prior to the accident covered as well, even though it wasn’t the fault of the liable party. Those types of decisions are things that we begin to explore with our students today and get them to really think about. Is it really right to have someone else pay for something that really wasn’t his or her fault? And how do we build that into our accountability? So those were the types of scenarios that we looked at, accepting money, looking at claims and putting claims on things that aren’t owed.
I don’t think we always need to talk about large dollar amounts. It’s sometimes helpful to put things in very small perspectives. What about photocopying things at work that are personal? Bringing in tax forms and copying some of those. A lot of those can be easily justified, perhaps, in a person’s mind, but are they correct? And by exploring those types of virtues, those types of issues, we felt that we could create some scenarios that might help the education community, starting at a very young age, and building those forward, so as we approach tomorrow they’ll be better able to function and survive an employment situation. We can continue to nurture their growth as employees throughout their careers. It’s been an interesting project. It’s one that hopefully will be continued, and we will continue to create scenarios and share some of those.
Penny Purviance: I am a recruiter with the state of Ohio, and so I served on the Public Sector Employment Management Advisory Group with other people from city, state and county level government as well as the judicial branch. When we sat down to determine employment in the government sector and how it differed from the private sector, we realized that we faced many of the same issues, but we were also looking at some things that might be different. We realized that we were going to be changing jobs and our employees were going to be changing more frequently than in the past. Government had always been one of those sectors where people came from high school or from college and stayed; that isn’t going to be the case in the future. So we’re looking at how we as public sector employers would be able to compete with the private sector, as well as to get the nature of the difference between and how that was going to play out in our system (in terms) of character. One difference is that we are primarily service-oriented, and we may not have a bottom line from the profit and loss standpoint. It may be difficult to measure our productivity, output, and successes. And so the public sector may be more interested in and deal more with, for example, public education and alcohol and drug programs, administration of the tax system, etc.
We also realized that we had some differences in the fact that we were dealing with civil service laws and some administrative procedures that may be different. We may not be able to discipline employees the same way as the private sector. We may not be able to demand the kind of performance, but we still realize the need to provide good service, and the character issue is very important. These discussions got to be extremely interesting in comparing the various areas. Public sector employment has always included job security, attractive benefits and interesting and challenging jobs. Did that affect the kind of people we were drawing from? We realized that innovations that were taking place in the public sector as well as the work environments around us were more business-like, that we needed to look at bottom lines. And we realized that a major difference was that if many of the character-related issues would happen in the private sector, the person would be terminated immediately. In the public sector the person is going to probably have that incident reported on the nightly news as a lead story or in the newspaper the next day. So, the issues may be the same, but they would be dealt with differently.
In dealing with the character issue, we decided that we really felt that many of the things that we were looking for in future employees, or in our own current staff, were things that you would probably learn in the family setting. We felt that the values and the core character traits that we were seeing and needing in the workplace were probably coming as a result of parents. We also realized that the extended family was changing. We don’t have the same kind of mother/father and extended grandparents nearby to foster the development of these values. And so, we asked how might we deal with the kinds of issues that we saw and help schools to deal with those?
In looking at the core character traits that we felt were needed from all the various different government entities that were on this committee, we came up with a list very similar to what Glenn’s group came up with, maybe in a different order. But the number one thing that we saw was honesty. Second was personal responsibility, civility or tolerance, or as we heard at lunchtime, justice. Fourth, was respect for authority and others and then loyalty, values and judgment. We came together to determine how we were going to look at these and how it would affect performance in the workplace–particularly in the public sector.
We divided behaviors into the good and not good. So in looking at honesty, the employee behavior might be to tell the reporter exactly what has happened when they are interviewed for a story. They may share a good idea, they may refuse to accept a gift, which is certainly something that cannot be done from a government person. They may admit a mistake and they may correct a problem. Dishonest persons may overstate educational experiences on a resume. They may manipulate a medical document. They may make copies for personal use. They might take office supplies for their home. They may put the personal mail through the mail meter, and they may misuse e-mail as a communication tool.
For personal responsibility, we looked at that as somebody who would accept responsibility for making a mistake, becoming involved in preventing theft or wrongdoing, or volunteering to help with an essential task. A person who doesn’t is going to blame someone else for the problem. You know, the computer just wouldn’t do it, it just didn’t happen. They are adopting the mentality that it’s just government, or the government owes me a living. They may engage in illegal behavior.
For respect for authority and others, we realized that this was a difficult one for the public sector because government doesn’t have the respect that it might, or should, and particularly not from young people. So we talked about this a lot. Observing the golden rule means they are going to treat others as they would like to be treated, particularly in the customer base, people who are coming in. A person who has a respect for authority and others would support diversity programs, build understanding, help the leadership team, and apply the rules consistently throughout the workplace. If that needed respect was absent, people might challenge the ultimate responsibility of supervisors and the workplace. They are not going to be able to get along with elected officials, because we have a different type of employment where people are elected, so it’s not an interview type situation. So we have to have people who would be able to get along with all kinds of folks. People who don’t have respect for authority or others may find themselves discriminating against other people, harassing other people, speaking with disrespect, and in the public sector that is a very difficult type of situation to deal with.
Civility and tolerance, this is the person who is going to honor her profession. He is going to promote training. They are going to go beyond the call of duty. And sometimes in the public sector that’s not expected. Strive to reduce tensions in the community and to try to keep the common good in a community and to have justice for all. A person who may not do this is going to be somebody who will very emotionally approach some of these kinds of issues and make the community situation more difficult.
Loyalty, the good part of that is supporting their supervisor or their co-worker, living up to commitments. A person who is not going to exhibit the loyalty trait that we felt was needed was somebody who was going to ridicule government, ridicule leaders, political leaders particularly, fail to respond to calls, not be able to work within the organization.
For values and judgment we identified that as a person who would engage in experiences of diversity, would be able to develop ethical reasoning skills in what’s right and what’s wrong. A person who is not going to do that, maybe the police officer who, under stress, may do something that he or she wouldn’t normally do, or end up in undesirable situations. Submitting to peer pressure, abusing expense accounts, these were the kinds of things that we were trying to think what is good and what is not so good so that we could give those kinds of examples.
We tried to develop some ways to change, because I think we can always say that we need character development and we want you teachers to do that. But how can we help you to do that and to get the examples we thought would be helpful. Then, to try to put some things together beyond character development, or curriculum development, which you are the pros at, what could we do as public sector employees to try to help with that? We talked about being willing to do doing some teacher in-service and that that type of thing. We do have programs now with adopt-a-school, where some of our employees are coming into the schools and to have students see people serving the public in the public sector, and having respect for that. I know this summer I went to Boy’s State to help that day as they re-enacted state government. And one of the readers there said, “I’m so appreciative to have you come because young people don’t trust government.” And they have to see somebody and have a role model, and it was really putting a lot of responsibility on my shoulders because I was about the only female there anyway and then I had to be somebody that they had respect for. But I think we were proud to be able to do that because we see the benefit in doing it. Career days and mock trials are some suggestions that we feel that we would be able to help schools with as well as young people to develop the kinds of character traits that we know we need in the workplace.
So, there’s no question about it, people will lose their job more often because of character traits than they will because of skills or abilities. Most recently we looked at a study of people who had been let go, terminated from state government, and of the 97 people who had been terminated through hearings there was only one that could possibly be related to a skill. Everything else was character. We know the importance of it and want to be able to help resolve some of those issues. So that’s basically what the public sector committee talked about.
David Smith: Floor is open to questions for any of the panelists. I’ll repeat the questions briefly just for the tape.
Audience: This really isn’t a question. It’s a result of a forum that I was able to participate with Honda and its suppliers two years ago. David was there, and through Lubrizol–I’m an assistant principal in Cleveland in a large urban high school, 2,200 students–we had a back-to-school day and brought Chad Foster in. He’s a speaker who works out of Atlanta and has written a book called Teenagers and the Real World. You don’t pay for him, you pay for his books and then each student, you know, gets a book. I think you have to buy 1,000. And we invited people from business to come to our school and allowed teachers to have a speaker to the classroom. The one focus was not how to get a job, but on character/ethics issues in the workplace. That’s what they addressed with the students, and it was just a phenomenal experience because students in our urban high school don’t understand the importance, that even though we have a nine day absence policy per quarter and it’s an automatic failure, they think that’s unreasonable. Whereas, you know, business says, if you miss nine days on the job, you’re not going to have a job. And the same thing with punctuality and honesty, and it was just a phenomenal experience because they were not hearing it from educators, they were hearing it from business, and business didn’t talk about how you get a job in our plant, but this is what is needed for character and ethics. So it was really a prior forum to your meeting that we were able to do this, and I thank you. I really should thank David.
David Smith: Yes, the Council for Ethics in Economics has a web site and the address is www.businessethics.org, and through that you can link to a new web site of the OPCE, or you can go there directly. That web site is called www.charactereducationohio.org. That’s a long one word, and these reports of the call center group, the manufacturing group, the public employment group, are there, and they’re filled with interesting examples and good comments from the business group.
(Audience question)
Evelyn Walker: Part of our report, in the appendix, has a list of some of the resources that we as a company are using for parents. From books, an excellent one by Charles B. Dygert, Success is a Team Effort, Super Self Esteem,and Children of Character, which is a book that was mentioned earlier in one of the sessions. Also, there is a consultant group that we are using, Cendalini. We’ve included some newsletters that we provide to our employees on a regular basis, “Work and Family Life”, “Balancing Job and Personal Responsibilities”, and some videos, Personal Accountability and For Goodness Sake are just a couple of examples.
LeJoyce Naylor: A couple of things, first of all, for our employees, we actually produce a book on ethical and legal conduct. And we make a point of putting ethics first, prior to legal because there are things that may be legal, but as a corporation we deem them as unethical and we don’t necessarily want to conduct business in that fashion. So that’s how we train our employees. From there we have several outreach initiatives where our employees go out into the local schools and they talk about ethics and we have round table discussions with some of our students just to get their perspective on ethical behavior, what do they feel is right, what do they feel is wrong? And we actually try to incorporate this into all of our outreach activities.
Glen Soden: Although we have a lot of tools that we use, we have an office of ethics vice president who works with our employees in small discussion groups. They look at ethical scenarios, and there are generally two answers that are very close, one more right than the other, which gives the employees a chance to engage in an ethical dialogue. So we make some of that available. A lot of what our group discussed were practical applications that we could suggest or recommend as opportunities in the educational environment. For example, inviting the local employers to come in and talk about how this impacts you and your role and to encourage students to develop some kind of values statement. We looked at other ways of doing morning announcements and discussing the values of the week. We talked about the value of awarding and recognizing and how much it means in our work environment to recognize people among their peers. We felt that was such a strong motivator in terms of what we do and how we do it, that it’s a piece that we, as financial services advisory group, strongly encouraged. We thought it might have some real practicality to bring that value forward and to award and recognize it in a school environment.
Penny Purviance: The public sector actually has a commission. We have an Ethics Commission that will do a lot of training and help interpret what is expected of you as an official of government, whether you are an elected official or a civil servant. They help to interpret the issues because sometimes rules will get in the way. Employees will say, “Gee, I know what’s right and wrong, but what are you expecting?” And so that commission has been very good to help people sort that out and clarify what the expectation is. These issues are something that’s of a higher nature for a public official or an elected official than just the fact that you don’t do it. For example, you can’t work back for government after a period of time. So there’re time frames that may be attached to it and the commission helps with that.
Glen Soden: We need to make this fun, too. I know our employees love fun and we’re trying to focus more and more on keeping the work environment fun. One of the things that our group talked about was giving the kids an opportunity to do some video scenarios, to play some of these scenarios, role-play, and get to do a little videoing to make it fun, to make it a fun part of the education process as well.
David Smith: Also, there are resources some big companies put together for corporate training purposes, but they’re available for use, things like the Ethics Game. I played one last summer at Ohio Business Week. We were on teams with lots of dilemmas and choices as to what the best course of action was. I was with a team of teachers, most of the others were teams of students, and the teachers did not win the ethics contest. They didn’t do badly, but it was fun to hear the groups’ discussions. The point is, I think there are two sides to ethical competency, one is the deep issue of character. How do we develop the virtues as habits? But the other is our capacity to make good decisions, judgments. Some of the issues in employment, or business or public service are complicated, so we need good ethical judgment and moral imagination about the consequences of our actions. If I do this, who might really be affected? These are not simple questions of character. We need both to be truly mature, ethical adults, and to have ethical competence and judgment and character. Other questions, please.
(Audience): I teach eleventh and twelfth grade vocational students who are convinced that anything they do before they are 18 gets hidden away and no one will ever find out about it, so it won’t affect their bondability or anything like that. First, I’d like to hear from an insurance agent whether or not that’s the case so I could tell them that, and then I also wanted to make a comment. There’s a game called Scruples that’s available at any regular game store that has all of these kinds of ethical questions, that is a real fun game for kids to play that has them look at values. Just make sure, some of the questions are not age appropriate, depending on what age you’re dealing with, so kind of look at the questions ahead of time. But I think it’s by Milton Bradley or something, but my first question is on bonding.
Glen Soden: Accountability and responsibility are really key challenges. Is there a sense of accountability and how do we replace some of the roles that are falling in some of the homes. It’s the attitude that anything I do up to a certain age doesn’t count. I think our luncheon speaker mentioned today that you can look at age four, and those types of values and virtues are learned at that point and they are carried out throughout life. So, there has to be an emphasis. Even though it may not be discoverable, they may not be arrested, it may have been forgiven, it may have been expunged, and perhaps we can’t do anything legally. But if those things have happened in the past and there is no feeling of responsibility or accountability, they are going to reappear in the future. So it’s a matter of educating them and informing them that these kinds of things can hurt you. We have had some very good employees that have taken a little bit more than they were entitled to through loans programs. Well, for example, we had an employee who double-dipped a little bit, and that was discovered. Good employee, but unfortunately, not bondable, and we couldn’t continue the employment relationship. The sad thing is a lot of times it happens to what you would consider good people. These are not bad people, per se, as everyone characterizes bad people. They are people who make flawed decisions of an ethical or value nature and they take something that really does not belong to them. They don’t see the accountability, the responsibility that they owe. That’s part of the challenge, not that we can legally do things sometimes, but that behavior seems to be repetitive.
Penny Purviance: And I would just add to that, if students have aspirations of running for elected office, all’s fair.
Evelyn Walker: I wanted to add too that ethical behavior is something that is a lifelong process of developing habits of decision making and behavior. If those behaviors aren’t developed so they are habits, so that they happen automatically, then you get into a scenario where every decision becomes “what are the odds”. Someone mentioned earlier, it depends on who’s watching me, and this isn’t about what are the odds of getting caught? This is about who I am. This is one of the things that we talked about in the Call Center Management Advisory Group, that one of the basics is self-esteem. Because, if who I am is important to me, then that determines my decisions, not deciding the odds of getting caught.
(Audience): I’m a fourth grade teacher and one of the things that we are asked to do is reflect with the children about Veteran’s Day and patriotism. And I was wondering, how is patriotism as a character trait for your employees and for your company reflected and if you might be able to speak to that?
Evelyn Walker: That’s a good question and I think all of the call center managers included some kind of community involvement as one of the traits that we’re looking for. And that would include patriotism and citizenship. In a business environment, it is very important to make a distinction between leadership in terms of self-interest and leadership in terms of service. We talk about serving our country; we talk about the service industry. I had some people question me originally when we talked about a servant attitude, but that’s what it’s all about, it’s about the community and what’s the impact on others, and I think patriotism fits right in there. We’re in this together. If we didn’t have the country that we have and the economy that we have and the government process that we have in place, if you’ve not been to another country, if you’ve not experienced what it’s like to live in France, for example, in a socialist environment, then that’s very hard to communicate to a young person, how very, very vital it is and how our country is. I think we can’t emphasize that enough.
LeJoyce Naylor: Community service is something that’s very important in most corporations. I can speak for my corporation, where we really do encourage our management and all of our employees to get involved. Also, it’s interesting because that question comes up a lot when we’re doing our community outreach. I think businesses have to serve as examples to show that yes, this is my job, but it is also a part of who I am and I am going to support certain things. For example, when it is time to vote, it is just so encouraging to see everyone coming in with their stickers on saying that I voted today. You know, there are times when employees may have to come in a little bit late or they may have to leave a little bit early, depending upon the shift, and that is definitely something that we encourage to happen. So yes it is very, very important to us and it is something that we try to communicate when we go out to schools, that this is critical.
Glen Soden: I guess I draw a parallel between patriotism and loyalty. And one of the challenges that I think a lot of businesses are facing is that a lot of our employees are viewing it as a two to three year commitment and anything beyond that is fair. I would use the Olympics as the example of patriotism. Not just self and own country patriotism, but the value of patriotism across all lines. There are so many excellent stories. Our speaker today spoke about uncommon champions, there are so many uncommon champions you hear from so many different countries in the Olympics, so the students who have the opportunity to see any parts of those have an opportunity to see patriotism from a lot of examples. Last night with Kathy Freeman’s run (Olympics), to see that kind of commitment and change over time, yet she has patriotism. She has patriotism, not only for her Aborigine tribe, but also for Australia. So I think those are the things that come into the workplace. Patriotism is strong and it certainly supports what we do, but again, it’s a loyalty to a country, it’s a loyalty to a factor in terms of a commitment, so I think that it does have a very definite place.
Penny Purviance: I think patriotism is one of the payoffs that many public employees get back, and that that is one of their benefits, that they are serving the greater community. That’s part of their payment. So if they learn it young, that’s going to be a reason they are going to choose the kind of career that they have chosen, so I’d love to see it in first grade.
David Smith: I thought of the Olympics too, and what do you do with patriotism when the Cold War is over so the Olympics is no longer about beating the Russians, but it is in fact about the global community? Look at Lubrizol’s guidelines; they are written in four languages on the front, or more than four, and this is the trend now in corporate ethics. The context of corporate ethics is the global economy. And that’s what we’re in, in Ohio, so how can we be good Americans, patriotic in the best sense of the word, but at the same time recognize that this means being part of a global community and working to build international understanding and an economy that benefits all the people of the world? It’s not just what can we get away with when we’re dealing with foreigners or something like that.
(Audience): Can you help me think outside of the box and give me some practical ways that people from the business sector might be involved, especially elementary school children?
David Smith: The question is, how can companies help schools in this endeavor, and particularly what are some of the unusual and creative ways that you can work with schools, particularly elementary schools.
Glen Soden: One thing, we’ve talked with some of the guidance counselors about having a one on one relationship with somebody from a business environment who comes in and meets with a student. A lot of these are students who have no home support, there may be a single parent or they may be living with grandparents. A student meets with this person, perhaps once a week, perhaps once a month; what I’m hearing from some of the guidance counselors is that these students look at this with great pride. You know, I have this person from the business community coming in to meet with me. And they may only meet for a half an hour, but it’s kind of an opportunity to explore free-range questions and answers. They are always done on school premises, so they are school offices, so you don’t run into any other issues, but that’s kind of a one on one relationship that they watch some of those programs grow and that one on one piece really does seem to make a difference long-term.
Penny Purviance: I think some of the things that we can do from the public sector is to have the kinds of services that you don’t see day in and day out explained to students. You know, the wildlife officer that might come in, somebody who’s working with environmental types of issues, somebody who is a meat inspector, or some of the jobs that they may not know about. And it helps to expand their knowledge about jobs, as well as the wide variety of things that you can do and still serve and give back to your communities. And it may be something that is of interest to them.
LeJoyce Naylor: I would have to agree. I think mentoring and networking is very important. What we try to do is tie character into all of our programs. For example, we have a program where we are working with an elementary school. We’re working with third and fourth grade students on reading proficiency, but we really try to have our volunteers attempt to go beyond reading proficiency and really get to know the student. I think you were just mentioning how you have to make some things fun and sometimes character just comes in throughout the course of the hour a week that the tutor and the student are meeting. And that’s a way that we are just kind of sliding it in without necessarily saying, “Here’s the key focus.” And what’s really amazing is some of the scenarios that students will share with someone outside of the school, because they are looking at this tutor as just being their friend; it’s a non-threatening situation. This person is not responsible for their grades. What we have found is that many of these students would really open up and there were times when our volunteers would bring in a book on a particular subject, or they may play a game that’s tied to some of the issues and concerns that some of the students have brought forth. So I really think the mentoring is key.
Evelyn Walker: I was just going to mention that Discover Card has a program that we call “What a Difference a Day Makes” and we encourage every employee to spend at least twenty-four hours in a year, which you wouldn’t think is very much, at least twenty-four hours in a year, helping children. Now that can take any format. It can be tutoring, it can be an after school program, or it can be helping build a playground. There are any numbers of things that our employees do, and we definitely encourage that.
(Audience): Well, my question is a little bit the same, but a little different. I’m the director of a community-based character program and we are right now trying to put together a luncheon for businesses to try and get them to partner with education and community and my question is twofold. If you were part of that luncheon what would you want to hear? We’re trying to get them involved in helping finance our program, and then we’re also trying to get some initiatives going for their businesses as far as what they would like to see. In the past we have done payroll stuffers for them, but we haven’t really gotten a strong partnership with them, so if you were going to that, what kind of initiatives would you like to see in that partnership?
Evelyn Walker: I think something about a partnership almost sounded like, what’s in it for business? And I think that we’ve tried very hard here, all of us today, to try to communicate, it’s in our best interests as well. So it’s not like we’re looking to have you help us in anything. You are helping us through your character education programs and it’s to our benefit to come out and help you in any way we can. I don’t think that as a group, you can agree or disagree, but as a group, we’re not looking for your help in stuffing envelopes or anything like that. It’s what can we do to help you? (Audience comment) That’s terrific. They were stuffing the word of the week information into the payroll envelopes, and I think that would be wonderful. I don’t know of anyone here, well, what are the things we run into? If it’s a major employer in your local area, that might be easier to pull off. One of the things that we run into, for example, with Discover Card, because we pull a number of different schools throughout the central Ohio area, that it might be difficult to coordinate how many schools are using the same word each month. But anything that we can do to help reinforce what you are doing, we’d love to be involved.
Glen Soden: Lucy Frontera shared something with us that I thought was rather interesting. She talked about some businesses that are being encouraged to actually give the parents a little bit of time on the first day of school so they can take their kids to school and spend that little extra time with them. There may be those kinds of initiatives that could be encouraged. So much of what we saw in our discussion groups in financial services were questions of how we can work to encourage the students so they take a lot of these things home. Sometimes it’s the parents who are learning, or siblings who are learning as much from the student. The student brings these experiences home and talks to parents and guardians about them.
David Smith: So part of the answer is, work with fellow educators to develop what’s going to be the most effective character education program and communicate that. Then say, in order to make this work these are the things we think we need and take your wish list to the luncheon.
(Audience): This isn’t exactly a question; it’s a comment in answer to your question in the back. I don’t know if anybody’s heard of KAPOW? KAPOW stands for Kids And the Power of Work, and it is an initiative by the National Child Labor Committee. In our district we are beginning our fourth year. It’s been a great partnership between businesses and partnerships and elementary classrooms. And a business partner actually goes to a classroom, eight visits, and they have a curriculum that focuses on stereotyping, teamwork, decision-making, some of those ethical things that you were talking about earlier. We have had all of our second, fourth and sixth grade classrooms participate who have a business volunteer. Everyone is trained so that everybody is on the same page. But it’s been a very good PR piece for our schools and our businesses and I would highly recommend it. It takes a little bit of starting up from the school end, but businesses that are fairly large and have a lot of employees have been very helpful because I can get a lot of volunteers from one business It’s a wonderful place to start as long as you have a coordinator. I would just go to the National Child Labor Committee.
David Smith: We’ve reached the end of our time here and I want to thank the members of our audience, but especially our panelists for helping with this session. Thank you all very much.